…being as it is mainly made up of pathetic excuses for the lack of any fresh content. I could tell you that I’ve been up to my eyes in work. I could tell you that I spent last week in the Netherlands and Belgium (Maastricht – great place – who knew?). I could tell you loads of things. But would you believe me? And, even if you did, would you find it an acceptable excuse for the shoddy state of grayblog?

Interesting theory about the possibility of artificially creating every possible television image.

So, Google makes a computer program that renders out all these pictures and stores them on hard drives. They make some kind of amazing image search techniques, and let the television industry buy footage.
Google will have all the pictures to cover all the Olympics that could possibly be arranged and all the pic-tures to put together every Super Bowl that could ever be played. They would have a bunch of new epi-sodes of Friends and all the seasons of Lost that could ever be produced…

It would need a computer the size of Manhattan to make it work, but an interesting theory nonetheless.

Tim Yeo says that there are too many potential candidates for the Tory leadership. The BBC estimates that there are "at least eight candidates". One commentator in the Independent at the weekend put the figure at eleven.
Under party rules, in order to stand for the leadership a candidate must present a petition bearing the signatures of twenty MPs. MPs may not sign the petition of more than one candidate. There are currently 197 Tory MPs. 11 candidates. Do the maths.

(Incidentally, I have reams of political writing that I’m waiting to unleash on you – albeit mostly in my head rather than on my hard drive – but I haven’t got round to it due to being too busy and distracted lately. Topics include the EU constitutional treaty, the British EU rebate, the future of the euro, the G8 meeting and protests, the separation of church and state and road pricing. More on all this stuff, and more, over the coming weeks.)

I’m never going to listen to my wife again when she says "don’t bother bringing the camera – it’s not a nice day and the photos won’t turn out well". I was quietly cursing the fact that I didn’t have the camera with me yesterday as we admired glorious and huge fields full of poppies near East Dean (the East Sussex one, not any of the the other East Deans) and then stood at the foot of the majestic cliffs at Birling Gap as the waves crashed in – all bathed in splendid sunshine. Bah!
Incidentally, I’m sure that there is a joke in a place name like Birling Gap. Much like there must be a joke in Tarring Neville.